DrawDown #7: Walkable Cities and Man Who Stopped the Desert
Announcement: next week we'll read one chapter instead of the usual two.
I. Review
II. Walkable Cities, p. 86
III. The Man Who Stopped the Desert, p. 118
IV. Next Week's Reading
(Recommendation: skip past this current climate events section, start at I. Review.)
A lot happened this week - Friday June 1st was the start of hurricane season in the U.S. Volcanic lava flow now blocks evacuation routes on Hawaii's big island. A Pakistani activist I discovered on twitter Umar Arshad is evangelizing tree planting there. Pakistani tweeps (twitter peeps) publish frequent posts on a severe drought in its first stages, which explains the wave of tree-planting calls to action from Pakistan twitter.
In California our state senate passed a housing bill which rezones neighborhoods to usher in more housing development. Construction costs remain high while rebuilding from last year's wine country fires, Los Angeles fires, and the Montecito debris flow approach the midpoint of completion. Speculators are buying and holding while first-time home-buyers relocate to affordable locales, or borrow from startups, or people here and elsewhere submit all-cash bids.
Emergency preparedness for climate-induced weather events is progressing, but it's an uphill battle. Forest departments conducted controlled burns in California and Arizona this spring. Prescribed burns consumed underbrush to shrink this fall's wildfire spread potential. Thinning trees to prevent fire means we face reforestation needs ahead. Emergency telephone operators are expected to have been re-trained in reverse 9-1-1 techniques. Knowing the 58 different technologies with different names for each of California's 58 counties prepares operators to quickly translate evacuation notification requests from CalFIRE, saving more time and lives than last year.
University researchers surveyed deaths on Pureto Rico, and published a formal report attributing more fatalities to last year's hurricane. But, this transparency buttresses pressure for faster response times from the federal government should a hurricane hit the island this summer. It's hard write a sentence to give that newspeg the justice it deserves; the rule of this bookclub is not to stop reading chapters because of overwhelming current events.
This week's chapters: Every week I think the chapter headline tells me enough, I get the basic idea, do I really need to read on? And every time I do read on, it's worth the effort. This week we have the first chapter I felt was "phoned in" but it has some good data points. The second chapter blew my mind.
I. Review
Last week we discussed "Compost" page 60 and "Turbines" page 2.
The chapter also reminded how recent these human-caused global warming practices are. A side article this host found on "Ephemeral New York" said in the 19th century, free-roaming pigs roamed the streets of New York, eating organic waste from sidewalks. The pigs prevented pungent methane "stench", which the dandies in that painting (above, right) surely appreciated.
II. Walkable Cities, page 86
Sucher followed Jane Jacobs who started her seminal new-urbanist book "Death and Life of Great American Cities" building world-class cities from a foundation of three chapters on sidewalks.
Jacobs' work followed that of top-down city planner Robert Moses.
This chapter was short. Neither Sucher nor Jacobs nor Moses were mentioned.
Chapter summary:
* Humans walked for most of history; Florence, Marrakach, Dubrovnik, Buenos Aires, and Paris are walkable.
* Walkable cities are back in fashion.
* To attract pedestrians a city stretch must be 1) useful, 2) safe, 3) comfortable and 4) interesting.
* Urban planners should focus on infrastructure, not just the pedestrian, to create walkability.
* Environmentalists, epidemeologists, and economists see benefits in walkable cities.
* As urban populations grow, people will want more walkability.
* Look to resources like walkscore and LEED building certification to create walkability.
How the chapter applies to our world today - San Francisco suffers lately from empty storefronts, ironic given real estate is so hard to find. Vacant retail spaces create a "dead wall" effect unfriendly to pedestrians. One solution: Orinda square directors loosened zoning restrictions, allowed spaces zoned for retail to also house business offices. This transformed the area. It now teems with people. Years ago the square's shops all closed early, many spaces were vacant, one restaurant near the parking lot stayed open and it was a cold, paranoid walk from dinner to the movie theater. Not anymore.
We can't close this chapter discussion without mentioning: San Francisco's "scooter wars." New tech companies placed scooters all over the city with an "ask forgiveness instead of permission" strategy. The scooters are rentable with a swipe through attached credit card readers. City dwellers recoil: scooter companies obstruct pedestrians with maximum-visibility-parking, standing scooters away from building walls. Others, like former mayor Willie Brown, feign neutrality in words while endorsing their novelty with photo ops.
The scooters satisfy half the walkable criteria:
* scooters are useful
* scooters are NOT safe for older pedestrians or disabled
* scooters are NOT comfortable for everyone
* scooters are interesting
These bicycle alternatives also draw customers away from Uber cars. More people on a sidewalk increase safety; safer sidewalks attract more people. With less retail (Radio Shack closed last year, a fantastic used bookstore closed too,) walkable stretches of cities are dropping their "useful" and "interesting" scores from the four-point list (above.)
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves." - Jane Jacobs
The scooters are colorful and lively. If ever we sought the ghost of Jane Jacobs, sidewalk scientist, for counsel, now. would. be. the. time.
III. The Man Who Stopped the Desert page 118
A special chapter of the DrawDown book. Most chapters are standard textbook: informative. A few are essays, italicized in the table of contents. They tend to be more inspirational and this chapter's story doesn't disappoint.
"Climate change is something I have to say about" he said through a translator.
He does not read or write, or know his exact age. The droughts of his area in the 1980s led to a famine, and his experimentation in the Bush.
This chapter is excerpted from the book "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth".
His farm in northern Burkina Faso was large by local standards -- fifty acres -- and had been in his family for generations. The rest of his family abandoned it after the terrible droughts of the 1980s, when a 20 percent decline in annual rainfall slashed food production throughout the Sahel, turned vast stretches of savanna into desert, and caused millions of deaths by hunger. For Sawadogo, leaving the farm was unthinkable. "My father is buried here," he said simply. In his mind, the droughts of the 1980s marked the beginning of climate change, and he may be right: scientists are still analyzing when man-made climate change began, some dating its onset to the mid-twentieth century. In any case, Sawadogo said he had been adapting to a hotter, drier climate for twenty years now.
Sawadogo added termites. These pests tunnelled and aerated the hard clay soil.
He said people laughed at him! But he watched his crop yields grow. He arranged stone borders outlining planting squares and stone lines separating sets of zai rows to interrupt water runoff.
Trees, out of nowhere, sprouted from some zai pits. Manure had carried over varied tree seeds.
Sawadogo is a pioneer in what VU University of Amsterdam environmentalist Chris Reij calls "farmer-managed natural regeneration" or "agroforestry." Wind-blown sand used to cover seedlings. Trees block wind and shade crops from overwhelming heat.
"Trees are like lungs" Sawadogo said through a translator. He said the more trees you have, the more trees you get.
Water tables. In the 1980s, water tables in the area were falling by a meter per year. Beginning the late 1980s, despite growing population and no increased rainfall, water tables started to climb. By 1994 rainfall increased, which many attribute the rising water tables to, but that's incorrect, Reij said.There is more. I rented the movie on Sawadogo "The Man Who Stopped the Desert" on Amazon. He is now known all over the world but a sad development updates his story. The land he regenerated was annexed by the government save for an acre or two. He is raising money to buy the land but listen to this - the property line they drew to annex his acres placed stakes in the middle of his father's grave and the middle of the floor of (it's difficult to discern) either his brick granary headquarters where he trades seed millets, or his brick home!
He doesn't understand the mean sentiment, but he's famous now and he possibly saved the entire human species by developing methods to stop a desert. AH! Why on earth did they place stakes in both those places?
Sawadogo is still alive and people can donate to his fund to buy the land which seems to be rising in price.
IV. Next Week
Next week we're going to read only one chapter. Let's read ..."Bioplastic" page 168. Seeing that typed out it's hard to just read a single chapter and not add a second. We can return to two chapters per, after next week.
See you next week.
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"He laments that work is moving too slowly. With the Sahel’s population doubling in 20 years, Reij says regreening needs to be finished within 10 to 15 years." smithsonian.com
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